It seems like just yesterday that I got home from Iraq and refreshed my laptop (Dell Latitude D610). I ran Fedora 8 the entire time I was in Habbaniyah. After getting home, I was excited to get a chance to skip 9 and go right to Fedora 10. I didn’t use it long before I got a new laptop (Dell Latitude D630). Linux never made it on the new laptop. After I read a review of Fedora 11 Beta, I figured it was worth a shot. I downloaded Gparted LiveCD, opened up 20GB of space and popped in the DVD. I split this posting into three sections: the good, the mediocre and the ugly.
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I have been asked by several small businesses and individuals regarding services like those offered by Carbonite, Mozy and iDrive. I’ve always had a bad feeling about the idea. Recently though, I thought a little harder about the reasons why I could never store all my data online. Of course, online backup systems are infinitely more valuable than no backup solution at all. As some readers have pointed out, online backup services have saved a lot of butts. At the same time, there are some factors that make online backups less attractive to the “old fashioned way” of backing up data. There are three main factors that I feel give standard backups an upper hand.
- Storage is cheap.
- Your data is only as safe as your password.
- When stored online, your data is no longer yours.
While these factors are why I do not recommend online backups, I want to take a moment to discuss when online backups do make sense.
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Update 2009.04.16: At the request of a commenter, I added a couple lines to the script that will dump the output to a text file in the root of the C: drive. I also corrected a couple errors in the script.
I was tasked to get a dump of all the users in our Schema Admins, Enterprise Admins and Domain Admins for our Forest. I started thinking about it and realized a couple things. Two of the three groups reside at the forest root while the Domain Admins group exists for every domain in the forest. This meant I would need to enumerate every domain and depending on the domain, enumerate either all three groups or just one.
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The difficult part with managing SNMP via Group Policy is that SNMP is not installed by default. The first step is to install SNMP on all the machines you want to monitor via SNMP. This can be managed a couple ways. The simplest method that I have used is the one Zenoss recommends. If you only have a couple of machines to install SNMP on, it may be easier just to go into the Add/Remove Programs –> Add/Remove Windows Components –> Management and Monitoring Tools –> Simple Network Monitoring Protocol.
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